Editor's Note: The following is a sidebar article by Stefan Korshak to the main news involving the murder of the chief editor of the Vechernyana Odessa newspaper, Boris Derevyanko. It was published on Aug. 14, 1997.
Twenty-four hours after the men and women of Vechernyaya Odessa newspaper lost their chief editor to an apparent gangland attack, upper lips are a bit stiffer than normal, and smiles have disappeared like yesterdays headlines.
But for the people who helped Boris Derevyanko make the publication the region’s largest and one of the most reliable, right now tears and sorrow are inappropriate.
They have a job to do.
“We have over 75,000 subscribers who depend on us. We cant let them down. We will publish on time, and we will change nothing in our editorial policy,” Derevyanko’s deputy, Larissa Bluzhnikova, said on Aug. 12.
A matronly woman with hair pinned neatly behind her Soviet-era eyeglasses, Bluzhnikova and her colleagues, mostly women who joined the paper in the late 1970s, do not appear to fit the mold of tough newspapermen who refuse to be intimidated even when the boss is gunned down.
“Boris Fyodorovich [Derevyanko] started this newspaper, and he collected people like himself here. Of course we’re pessimistic now, but we can only carry on … his tradition,” said copy editor Ludmila Fyodorova.
The people working at Vechernyaya Odessa don’t talk like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and they don’t dress like Lois or Clark. They are neither the brash young reporters of Watergate fame nor superheroes.
Ties and sheer stockings are hardly the norm, reporters don’t run around talking into mobile phones, and no one races to file stories by e-mail after expense account lunches with insiders in business and government.
Derevyanko’s co-workers and employees remembered him Tuesday as a journalist of uncompromising principles and listed some of the qualities that helped him shepherd the paper through a turbulent 23-year run.
Truth. Honesty. Accuracy.
“Thats the kind of person he was … he was just born that way. I guess that’s why I wound up here, that’s why we all did, and I couldn’t go anywhere else,” said Anatoly Konorchenko, Derevyanko’s driver for the last 17 years.
Alla Koresiuk comes from a younger generation of journalists, but agrees that Derevyanko’s philosophy was timeless.
” I graduated from university in 1991, so unlike most of the people here I don’t have the experience of fighting against Soviet authority. But those in power still will often abuse their position,” she said.
That was Boris Fyodorovichs credo: always challenge authority, always seek the truth.
“I believe in that, and as long as I can follow the truth I will work here.
With the founder and chief editor of the independent publication suddenly gone, Vechernyaya Odessa’s future, which until yesterday looked bright given its rising circulation and a solid reputation as one of a very few reliable sources for local news, has become murky.
To call replacing the man who founded and built the paper a daunting task is a gross understatement.
“As an independent newspaper we, the workers’ collective, have the right to elect a new editor. Provided that we are allowed to exercise that right, we will work on this question immediately after the funeral … [but] the same people who murdered Boris Fyodorovich would be very interested in taking over this newspaper or closing it,” said Bluzhnikova, who noted that the paper’s healthy finances would help it retain its autonomy.
Koresiuk, who has been the subject of death threats, was more specific.
“The attack [on Derevyanko] could only have been in the interest of the city authorities, who are worried about our newspapers strong opposition to them in the [March 1998] mayoral elections,” she said.
Obviously we have nothing to do with this terrible event, said Odessa City Executive Council Media Specialist Olga Polnyakova.
Assistant Odessa Police Chief Grigory Epur said Monday that police are exploring all possible leads and have not ruled out any motives, a comment which the newspapers staffers found laughable.
That’s silly. A newspaper editor gets shot with a silenced pistol on the way to work, and the police are saying it could have been a robbery, said reporter Valentina Chervichenko.
“It was a political killing,” said Konorchenko. “The police will arrest no one. They never do in such cases.
But the people at Vechernyaya Odessa are less angry than quietly sad at the loss of the publications patriarch. And rather than gearing up to hunt gangsters, the men and women on the seventh floor of the Odessa Press Building are steeling themselves for the future.
Whoever made the attack wanted to intimidate us. … Well, it won’t work. We will continue to write the truth here, because thats what Boris Fyodorovich taught us to do,” said Konorchenko.
“Of course I’m frightened,” said Koresiuk. “But what can you do? Here, we always were in opposition to authority, critical of the big bosses. Derevyanko is gone. But we can’t stop his work.”
